Gisi and I stayed at the Seehof Netzen Hotel at the Netzener See for the weekend to celebrate our 20th wedding anniversary. I set my alarm for 5:30 AM this morning, and when it went off, I looked out the window and saw drizzling, cold rain in a still pitch black night.

There were dozens of reasons not to go run, and only a few to actually get my running clothes on, stretch, get out the door, and go run into a cold and rainy night. I then thought of the 42,000+ Berlin Marathon runners who were starting to wake up in their Berlin hotels and homes looking out their windows just like I was thinking that they were going to have to run for hours in this weather, when a spark of will power hit me and I suddenly found myself on the floor with my running clothes on stretching.

Five minutes later I walked out the hotel door, door the steps, and let myself take the initial drenching of cold rain as I followed the dim street lights out of the forest towards the village of Netzen. As always, once your body responds to the shock and heats up, it becomes rather refreshing to run in rain, and was adventurous to run through the dark night.

Not being able to see the street in front of me at times, I had to run carefully, shuffling my feet to avoid any surprise potholes. I realized that leaving a half hour later would have been better for optimal light, but soon enough the black sky began to turn dark gray and I began to see the dim outlines of where I was going.

I finally made it out of the trees, through Michelsdorf, and off to Lehnin where I ran through the grounds of the Kloster, back out, through Lehnin again, and up through Namitz, under the A2 Autobahn, at which point I decided to take a shortcut on a path which led into the forest what I understood was toward our hotel.

The pathway turned into two pathways and then three and more and soon I felt myself wandering around in the trees with no sense of north, south, east or west. I then realized that I could still hear the sound of traffic on the A2 and so kept running in the direction away from that, and when it was too far away to hear anymore, my smartphone was able to make a connection from time to time enough for Google Maps to indicate where I was in the forest.

I eventually made it out of the forest right at the 250-meter-to-Seehof-Hotel sign, and had a victory run back to the hotel, standing at the dock looking out over Netzener See for a moment enjoying the peaceful scene before returning to our hotel room with my now completely soaked and muddy running shoes. In all, a very refreshing run.

Berlin Runner

My name is Edward Tanguay, my marathon training consists of one long run a week, usually between 3 and 4 hours of running through or out of Berlin, often as an adventure run to go discover some landmark or investigate some part of town.